Ballet on Floyd

Ballet is back and it's two sisters together and too cute for words.

Gnome Home on Floyd

A brick enclosure for the garden gnomes - where it that 1976 edition of Gnomes by Wil Huygen and illustrated by Rien Poortvliet, when you need it?!?

These guys got co-ordinated bedding, pillows, a roaring fire, tea lights and copious organic almonds and celery... eventually they were encouraged to relocate to Belle Isle and thankfully we think they took M up on the offer, though their note contained bad grammar and muddy footprints.

Barefoot Puppets, RVA Makerfest

This was focussed making all round, from shadow puppets with our friends at Barefoot to cartoon training, including some left-brained i.e. upside down, manga hamster copying for me. There was stacks more on offer and lots of geeky coder types with robots...

Studio Two Three, RVA Makerfest

Girls with vats of black ink, rolling pins and steam rollers... what's not to love about this latest map of RVA c/o Studio Two Three.

Gnome Homes, Belle Isle

The kids gathered the materials, from all over! A giant gnome see-saw branch, seen here and then tiny river shells (gnome headphones) and dripping river weed and marsh grass bedding. The adults did the building work, though for M's gnome home there was a pool of minnows for fishing and a small boat on offer - the Robin Hood of the miniature world.

Three years ago...

Trip 3. Shirley Plantation

Well this had it all for entrances... sweet smelling cotton fields and vineyards, once tabacco,  horses penned behind white picket fences, a tree-lined drive, a circular (!) dovecote, freshly mown lawns, an ice house, giant magnolias and a splendid river view - that now includes the Honeywell Plant on the far bank - one of the world’s largest producers of caprolactam, used in nylon polymer for carpet, plastics and films.

It was peaceful and had been lived in by the family for 11 generations, including a Danish granny who needlepointed the dining room chairs in the 1970s, just like mine did; a female slave abolitionist, confederate politics yet gave safe harbor to wounded Union soldiers and of course their was the original English 'Shirley', the first Governor's wife, who never saw the plantation.

After School at Maymont

The stillest, quietest afternoon for un-winding much higher into the trees, then secret paths down to the  waterfall and stepping stones across giant koi for oranges & a pause...

Then bundu bashing through bamboo and down into a damp grotto, before  the bears, though instead running out of steam on a large rock and lying down to stare at the tree tops. Uphill there was a speedy old groundhog and finally J's 'ice cream' tree and P.

Pink Quilt on Floyd

Just sometimes domestic chores - cupboard clearance on this occasion - lead to great things...

This little denim dress was bought by a doting opa on a trip to Holland and now, 8 years & 2 wearers later it is going to become part of my childhood quilt, conceived by my godmother in the late 1970s and finished by my doting mother and replenished by me - 40 hexagons so far, with new fabrics selected by M.

Harvest 4, Urban Farm

Quarts of amazing yellow & red pear tomatoes, the seconds turned into a salad by M, plus the tromboncinos actually found a home in the accompanying Waitrose beef & beetroot casserole.

Music Studio on Floyd

So here it is... a keyboard and a bit of Eternal Flame with Bonnie, later Happy Birthday was finessed, as it is the season. Next up (Every thing I do) I do it for you, most certainly without Bryan.

Lessons to come but all this free thanks to Girls Rock! RVA and their new 'Instrument Lending Library'.

Wedding Party, Southside

Weddings and water... we got to do our first American wedding party this weekend. A thing of complete style and thought and joy and Hora dancing and actually some rather badly behaved children, but lets not focus on that.

So there are some remaining sunflowers from the night and by the river a moment of calm to contemplate all life.

Salon on Floyd

... and now it is 'evened' off by her sibling. Yup - not an improvement.

Next stop the thrift store for Barbies who fancy having their hair cut as diversion therapy.

Urban Farm Day, RVA

Shake the hand that feeds you... Richmond's Farm Tour Day took us down to 'my' farm on the southside and the girls picked plenty for supper and we sweltered through an amazing tour of Ugandan compost and hydroponic beds that re-used paddling pools and giant refuse buckets.

Tricycle Garden's ambition is to change food culture by improving access to supplies in the food deserts of the city's east end, coupled with educating kids,  including ours, to value things that are grown near home. Now mine want to play truant on Wednesdays and join me.

PS: Named for the bikes they unearthed when clearing land for their first allotments aka community garden in Church Hill.

Soccer at Fox

Active Fridays after school with miniature soccer team mates, the best (English) coach ever and the most supportive big siblings on the sidelines. J scored an own-goal amongst some great defending and dribbling.

Harvest 3, Urban Farm

One day we'll compost, for now I absorbed the serious wisdom of the team down on the farm, from rat proofing, the aerobic but damp conditions, plentiful wiggly worms and the critical 70:30 ratio of carbon (brown matter) to nitrogen (green matter + coffee grounds).

On the table the pepper seconds - so many varieties and such a gorgeous gleam.

NB: The palette box 3x3x3 dimensions makes me for a perfect scale of mix.

Paradise Park, RVA

A bit of after-school decompression in Paradise Park...

Here's J practising the Pledge of Allegiance: Take 1.

Texas Beach on the James

Here goes one kid heading down stream on a quiet Sunday afternoon and later she got far more adventurous and sped over rocks in faster water until she was caught.

The other meditated in a calmer spot.

Fall on Floyd

The window in Shields Store is changing seasons again and so we got an early pumpkin, some just-changing leaves, new radiant concentrated liquid watercolours from Dr PH Martin's and the best bit ever - metallic gold leaf.

Oh we/I love a bit of glitter!

Back to Belle Isle, RVA

The river is low and gungey but that didn't stop this paddler... The middle of a fab grey, damp day of reconnections and late night southern grits & fries with local beer & a pina colada!

Trip 2. Forecast, Anderson Gallery

Thematic climate change shows aren't normally my thing but this one did it with style and intensity and I was just so grateful for not being bludgeoned with earnestness.

Mark Dion spoke... from printmaking joys in black and red (and blue if you're starting out), through to crazy mythical monster trees and installations of rotting fancy cakes. This is stuff that stretches the brain and in a brilliantly subversive tree of knowledge I found all my enthusiasms amusingly on one big branch - modern museums, wunderkammer, gardens, zoos, follies and grottos, not forgetting the colonizing political systems on which they grew.

Downstairs fabulous rain forest roots and abstracted energy grids in cut-paper and in the walls, tiny kaleidoscope observational videos taken at water height along the Peruvian Amazon. Thanks to Adriane Colburn for that.

Harvest 2, Urban Farm

The poblanos were gleaming green but achieving 1lb of basil was endless as, after a very dry spell, there was mould lingering on almost every leaf.

Baking on Floyd

Back to school British flapjacks...

First Friday, September

Crazy big landscape collage, Happy Bulletproof Chinese Garden Star Guaranteed Very Good, and a giant coloring book launch that hooked J - one for the festive list - an update on a 1969 edition with 19 more RVA artists. 

Trip 1: Poe Museum, RVA

So to the start of the alternative curriculum and a weekly encounter with things not far from here.

Today is was Edgar Allen Poe. Of whom I knew little, though perhaps absorbed a bit thanks to Benedict's Sherlock and a dash of Stephen King. The horror starts with a tiny boy of theatrical roots, adopted into a Richmond family with big issues and ends with this tiny museum, that is not even one of the 10 homes he lived in. However he once stood outside the entrance stone cottage as a young cadet showing a French General the town and bricks from his first place of work help build this shrine at the end of the magical courtyard garden, with a pair of black cats observing.

There was so little directly of him, at most his 'death' stockings and scraps of handwriting and after-death busts, but in it's atmospheric handling, plentiful labels and characterful setting, the museum conjures him up brilliantly and there was even an echo of Lord Byron at Newstead Abbey, hanging in the air.

I consumed two short stories in the Library later - The Cask of Amontillado and The Pit and the Pendulum. Dark, dark tales.

Harvest 1, Urban Street

... and so to work, picking veggies in Tricycle Gardens' urban farm, overlooking McDonalds.

Okra, peppers, aubergine aka eggplant and amazingly curvy squashes were on the menu at local restaurants and for sale through local stores in Richmond's East End.

For me the task of working in multiples of 16, as I got my head around imperial aka standard measures, was enough to occupy my time.